Poetry

Between my ribs I would tattoo the perforations by needles for hemi-thorax drainage, from broken ribs...

In one of the rooms (a total of nine) there is a door behind the door. This door has not been opened for thirty years. The room itself is a monumental coffer, a reliquary, what the family refers to as a fouillis (a mess).

In my dreams, the dogs always devour me

I am now trying to write about all this but words are never enough to describe the loss of words. The words of my own language had become objects already then, the words of the other language are objects too, maybe even more gnarled and barbed. Every day they must be brought from a storage room under your house, where they lie dusty and crammed like appliances and bicycle wheels; then you must carry them up on your back and carefully arrange them, so that simultaneously with the text you also build the walls of the house, so that you have a bed to sleep in, a cup in which to pour the coffee.

In her poetry and conversation, Langa acknowledges a debt to a wide swath of European poets – to Auden and Cavafy, Rimbaud and Joyce, Rilke and Tomas Tranströmer. Yet she is a quintessentially Latvian poet, building on the massive folk tradition unique to this Baltic country, stretching right back to its Sanskrit roots.